The Last Book Party(45)

“Did you meet Franny right away?”

“I saw him during my second week,” Jeremy said. “He was standing on a chair in the dining hall, singing some sea shanty at the top of his lungs. It was tempting to scoff at his pretty-boy looks, but he was so oblivious to his appeal that it was pointless. I started hanging out in his orbit. For some reason, he liked me.”

“What was he like?”

Despite everything, I was still curious about Franny. Maybe I always would be.

“He was unlike anyone I had ever met. He didn’t want to argue with anyone. He just wanted to have fun. I had no idea what he saw in me. We were opposites. He was the golden boy, and I was the moody Jew. Once we started hanging out, I could forget how weird it was for a kid like me to be at Choate, where every other kid summered on Nantucket and had grown up hearing about the glory days of Choate’s crew team from his grandfather.”

I wasn’t surprised that Jeremy and I were both drawn to Franny for the same reason—how he made us feel lighter and freer, not like who we were but who we wanted to be.

“Franny loved that I was a writer, but I think he loved the idea of it more than my writing itself. I’m not sure he read anything I wrote. He doesn’t particularly like books.”

“I know. He told me that. I didn’t believe him.”

“He liked showing me off to Tillie and Henry, though. I think he knew they would be pleased that he had a bookish friend.”

“And were they?”

“They were. And it was mutual. The first time I went home with Franny, for fall break, I sort of fell in love with them.”

“Sounds romantic,” I said.

“It was romantic,” he said. “Not sexually romantic, but, well, you know.…”

“I do. What is it about them?”

“They’re a very seductive family,” Jeremy said, rolling onto his side.

“No shit,” I said.

“Franny was always itching to get back to Choate, but I always found it painful to leave. Henry was so funny and expansive and knew so much about everything. Tillie was more distant with me, sometimes even cold, but now and then she would talk to me about words, what she called ‘the flavor of them.’ Being there was like landing on a different planet. It opened up possibilities for me I had never considered.”

I was jealous that Tillie had encouraged him.

“Henry and Tillie pushed me to consider writing as a real calling. To take myself seriously and work at it like they did. Meeting them was a kind of revelation.”

A revelation. It was how Tillie had described her discovery of Truro in her columns. How I had felt at Henry and Tillie’s party back in June. As though a door had opened, revealing a world and a way of being I hadn’t believed was a possibility for me.

We lay still, looking at the stars and not speaking.

Slowly, I stood up and stretched my arms toward the haze of the Milky Way.

Jeremy looked up at me, his smile drowsy and sweet. I was tempted to lie back down beside him. Run my fingers along his cheek. But his honesty was unsettling, even a little frightening.

“I’m going to turn in,” I said. “Big night tomorrow.”





40





The next morning, I found my mother at the kitchen table, fingers wrapped around a mug of coffee, paying rapt attention to Jeremy, who was describing the plot of his novel.

“So it’s a tale of unrequited love?” she said.

“I wouldn’t call it that,” Jeremy said. “More like love unconsummated. Thwarted.”

“Well, I cannot wait to read it,” my mother said. “And to think, you’re not even thirty!”

I poured myself a cup of coffee and sat down at the end of the table.

“He’s a veritable wunderkind,” I said. “Is that the word?”

“It is, and I’m not,” Jeremy said, looking a little embarrassed.

My mother set down her coffee cup and placed her hands, palms down, on the table. She looked at Jeremy sternly. “Do not shy from your gifts,” she said. “You are a very lucky young man to have been born an artist. Embrace it.”

After breakfast, Jeremy and I set off on a walk down to the marsh and to Corn Hill for a swim, after which I’d promised to drive him to Henry and Tillie’s so he could hang out with Franny and help with last-minute party preparations. It was one of those early fall days, when all the colors seemed dialed up a notch, the grass a brighter green, the water a deeper blue. The sun was warm, but the air cool, as if September were announcing itself.

As we descended the rough path through the beach plum bushes and down the hill to the marsh, Jeremy asked, “Does your mother really think artists are born and not made?”

“That she does. Mathematicians too.” I yanked a long thread of honey-colored grass from the dirt and poked it between my teeth.

“It’s a rather restrictive view,” Jeremy said. “If you need anything to make it as a writer, it’s stamina, not genius. No wonder you have trouble finishing stories. It’s not magic, you know.”

“Isn’t it, though? My best stories have sort of … poured out of me.”

We walked on the edge of the marsh, our feet sinking into the damp dirt as little green-brown crabs scuttled sideways into their holes. A great blue heron glided down in front of us and disappeared into the tall grass.